I wonder if the majority of people designing/pushing these huge systems of weird cartoon avatar interaction systems... are a tad bit on the spectrum (Which gives them superpowers in understanding tech/algorithms....) but a side effect is the uncanny valley of these weird avatars being pushed by these teams at Meta/FB. It feels more 'creepy' to me talking to a cartoon 'uncanny-valley' representation of a person rather than just seeing their actual photo/video feed.
reading this post on "Avatars, Anthropomorphism, and Autism Spectrum Disorder"...
> A 2016 study looked measured the neural responses of children with ASD and neurotypical children when shown unfamiliar human and robot faces. The test showed that the targeted responses were present for both for neurotypical children, but only for the robot faces for the kids with ASD. “Together, these studies provide some evidence that individuals with ASD may typically process anthropomorphic rather than human faces
I think it's much more a facet of limited performance (as mentioned in the talk itself) on these platforms rather than anything else. Performance on headsets is a challenge on pretty much all of these apps, from VRChat to Rec Room. I also think a lot of people that look just at the pictures don't realize that presence in VR adds a lot and can compensate for some loss of graphical fidelity. It's like how the first 3D games were quite blocky and a lot less refined than the best 2D games of the era but just the ability to move your character and the camera in 3D compensated for the bad graphics, to an extent.
But why the fuck do I need this when I can multi task using screens. It just feels that once they do their final state multiverse and force us inside, we ll still have multiple screens and workspace area to organize.
The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...
The push for low fidelity, as usual, and as mentioned in this very talk, is the limited power of these mobile systems pushing dual 2k displays at 90Hz.
I’m more than a touch aspy myself which makes this faux-biting rebuke that sounds cool in only my head a bit meta: but nerds figured out how to sell tech stuff to normies quite some time ago.
The biggest games are Orcs, Humans and a Lot of Brown (the Riot and most of the Blizzard portfolios). Or Toon With a Lot Of Purple (Overwatch, Fortnite, many Playstation titles). Or Brown (Modern Warfare, PUBG, CS:GO, R6). Or anime. Or photoreal (Unreal engine titles excluding Valorant & Fortnite, RDR, Cyberpunk...)
When you reach 100m users, the ideas get limited. C'est la vie.
I initially thought the same, but using even the current gen avatars for multiplayer on the Quest 2 feels great and is surprisingly convincing. The speech to mouth movement detection looks natural and combined with the body language being accurately represented with reverse kinematics I felt like I was colocating very realistically.
I suspect its just easier and faster (in terms of cpu and network throughput) to translate human facial expessions to a digital represebtation and apply it to lofi animated character than using something more hi def.
It's coming, to, of all things, Second Life. Second Life is adding "puppeteering", and this works with head tracking, face tracking, and full body tracking. Users have been working on VR viewers. (The client is open source.)
It's all very experimental, but there is a meeting in Second Life every two weeks[1] where all of this is demoed. Some of the attendees are rigged for full body tracking, and, with good quality Second Life avatars, which have far more detail than Meta or VRChat, and can do facial expressions, they look reasonably good. It's striking how someone with a full rig dominates a meeting without even trying. They're so much more present than the people sitting at keyboards.
Hardware is a big problem. You need a good gamer PC to run all this and get the full effect.
And a VR headset. And tracking gear. This is a real problem in the era of the $99 Chromebook. It's not getting cheaper, either. The first NVidia graphics card that was good enough for this was the NVidia 1060 with 6GB VRAM, in 2016, introduced at $250. It still costs about $250 to get that level of GPU power from NVidia.
People who really want to be looked at - performers, influencers, etc - will need a full tracking rig. The audience doesn't.
I'm sure some PM somewhere in Meta is proud it's using that horrid avatar instead of an actual video. But ooft, it looks so goofy on what seems to be a serious conversation.
Their whole metaverse bet seems weirder and weirder by the day.
I completely agree, this absolutely horrendous for a visual presentation. A wii like character, no proper lighting, floating with no legs and the subtle fidget moving of the limbs, lack of facial expression and flapping mouth that hardly mimics the sound. What did facebook spend all their money on?
I'd rather see video or even a still picture of Carmack than this monstrosity.
And the camera pans around, which John said is driven by someone on the production team... but, there is nothing to see there. I guess the motion is introduced to keep us from falling asleep?
It does look goofy, doesn't it? Like an elaborate joke. I'm not trying to shit on people's hard work, but it all looks so, I don't know.. bland and not interesting AT ALL. Like Second life meets that playstation thing, but even worse somehow.
I'll happily spend an evening watching vrchat shenanigans or 2.5D vtubers but this thing just goes so far beyond 'corporate inoffensiveness squeezed the soul out of it'. It's like the developers actively disdain their own work.
Sometimes good work needs to be shit on in a constructive way.
This is bloody awful quality in visual quality and marketing. You want to show something that works well. This... this does not "work", let alone well.
Zuckerberg is surrounded by yes men/women. That's the only explanation I can think of. I watched a few of their videos. The video with him talking about Zoom integration with Meta and splitting off in groups with avatars, etc. Does anyone really want to work like this?? The entire benefit of remote work is that I don't have to deal with this BS. Please stop trying to force these weird extroverted fetishes like avatar huddle groups and awkward virtual whiteboarding sessions onto remote work. We have 2d whiteboarding apps that already work!
The overall bland soulless corporateness of it all is creeping me the fuck out. These presenters are all 100% dead inside.
I watched a bit of the conference and they may start to pivot. They were talking about how whatever it is they were building is going to have browser integration.
One of Meta’s moto is “we’re only 1% there” or something to that effect. I could imagine that it’d be really cool if they did that every year and it gets better and better and then we look back at the first ones and see the huge progression. I’m excited personally
Part of the problem would be that you can’t have video of a person’s face while they are wearing a headset as far as I know. I expect that to remain a technical blocker even as the graphics horsepower of the headsets increase over time.
To be fair, a video of a VR event is way different than being in VR for that event. A comparison is a video of people watching a movie versus actually watching that movie, except more extreme. VR is far more visceral, at least when done well. A video review of, say Half-Life Alyx, is no comparison to actually being in it.
Now, that said, Meta's seems to be floundering a lot for its actual art style, there is no doubt about that!
Did you listen to Carmack? It's addressed immediately. He's specifically making a point about what is currently feasible and mentions how he wanted it this way since the last Connect (and said as much last time).
This level of quality is fine for low-end headsets like Quest. All game engines should be able to increase rendering quality on high-end systems. It's a mystery why they don't do this.
My company's Slack was dying laughing at how negative his event was within the first 10 minutes. And then towards the end he says "and now I'm gonna be grumpy" and we were sent reeling.
Favorite quote was "one of my internal posts was reported and taken down for not being sensitive enough."
Holy cow and he said this was a CUSTOM BUILD to maintain frame rate! So it can’t even push this level of graphics normally. For what it showed I’d expect about 600 FPS. And the arms are jittering..Wtf?
Seriously, who wants these VR systems? Have we evolved to the point where giant tech companies no longer require customers? Even the high end-VR games I've played in the mall aren't as convincing as a standard PC/Console game. From what I've seen a mere 260k VR units were sold in 2022. Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.
Where are the lines around the corner? where are the reports of sold out VR headsets? I haven't been able to buy a GPU for years, but I'm willing to bet I'll find a discounted quest if I go looking.
I would love an answer to this. They look like bad mobile games because it has to run on mobile hardware. Interactions, latency etc. are all worse than on some average PC game.
You could just log into, I don't know, ARMA III server as a department and host your meeting there instead of this torture.
Even on the PC-connected headsets (Index, Vive, etc.) where the graphics are infinitely better, the games are still really meh. It feels like a solution in search of a problem. Once the novelty of "ooh, 3D and position tracking" wears off, the games themselves feel like tech demos... even the best VR games pale in comparison to your typical "very positive" rando indie game on Steam, of which there are hundreds.
You know how Nintendo sold a bazillion Wiis and Switches even though their hardware is pretty subpar? They had solid, fun games with charisma and charm.
The VR world, meanwhile, has... uh... disembodied techbros floating in a shrink's office with you? I really respect Carmack, but... what the hell, man?!? Any of his old indie or id software games were SOOOO much better than this Meta crap.
The whole thing feels like a sunken cost fallacy where some True Believers keep making new headsets, but they're not fundamentally getting better... still stuck in dorky-gimmick land.
> Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.
The bet isn't that the Quest or any extant VR headset _is_ the iPhone, the bet is that some successor of the Oculus could be the iPhone. Facebook is hoping they can either capitalize on it directly or hold the patents to skim the cream off of whomever does.
The current headsets are more like PalmOS -- pretty cool, but not yet cool enough. They're for geeks and enthusiasts. If my silly analogy holds, we're currently waiting for Nokia and Blackberry to show up and miss (but make a lot of progress along the way), and then we'll get an iPhone around ~2028, and the bet might pay off.
So Facebook drops billions per year to be palm pilot? What incentive does anyone have in this org to deliver an actual product/customer value? How do we know VR isn’t a bet for the 2030s?
If this was a small labs net spending a few million a year… then I’d buy this, but we’re looking at a bet the farm situation.
I will die on the hill that PalmOS was primarily a marketing failure. They were always primarily thought of basic personal organizer devices, but the Palm Tungsten and Zire lines (Starting around 2003) had very strong multimedia and gaming functionality.
World is bonkers... can someone elaborate what is happening @ FB and other Silicon Valley companies where people seemingly went crazy? There are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating a metaverse like thing with stunning detail, but this?
The direct technical explanation for the fidelity gap here, as has been stated elsewhere in the comments here, is that Meta's metaverse VR tech runs off of a smartphone chip. Performance is thus very limited. Further compounding this limitation is the fact that since it is VR, the application has to render the world twice every frame - so rendering capability is ostensibly cut in half. The result is bland, low-detail, flat-looking (and in this case jittery and glitchy) graphics.
I think this gap could easily have a hand in preventing the Facebook metaverse from reaching mainstream appeal. We've had gorgeous graphics in games and virtual worlds for quite a long time now - just look at what Crysis achieved fifteen years ago. To the average consumer who doesn't care about the technical limitations and issues behind the product, this is like rewinding the clock twenty years.
As far as why Zuckerberg is so hyped on it - your guess is as good as mine. Just seems like a really misguided attempt at creating a new platform/ecosystem that they control entirely and can monetize.
> There are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating a metaverse like thing with stunning detail, but this?
John Carmack is spent.
Richard Garfield also created Artifact.
Niantic also created Wizards Unite.
Markus Persson made some videos of some kind of Stargate Universe spaceship game with a programmable 16 bit computer. It sounded cool, but people hated it before it was even released.
There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops!
> are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating
It's just super really fucking risky. It's not this, VC thing where you are just putting out winners over and over again.
There are no Marc Lore types in gaming. There's no exit strategy for Marc Lores of gaming. And if you don't have any idea what I'm saying or talking about at this point, if you're like, who the fuck is Marc Lore, you are not comprehending how far you are from understanding the challenge of making these games with huge audiences that last for years.
You are just as likely to get a hit from an extremely talented and lucky unknown as you are from Richard fucking Garfield. A title that cost its developer $1 to make can become a #1 App Store game at roughly the same a-priori likelihood as a game with a $100m budget.
The mistake wasn't taking a risk. Better Zucc make video games than a payment system or a crypto trading platform or a spare room rental company. The mistake is that John Carmack is a dick.
> It sounded cool, but people hated it before it was even released.
My recollection was that a bunch of people were really excited, a bunch of people were like, "What is this?", and then Notch basically just lost interest and wandered off. I think he's one of those people that needs externally imposed structure and doesn't know what to do with himself now that he's super rich.
---"
There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops!
---"
Examples of these big flops please.
Creating a big title is a team effort. You can shove your top designer if he doesn't have a proper team. Ex blizzard guys, almost all of them failed, why? Because they jumped out, believed they were hotshots, but their team/general game idea was lacking. Also look what happened to David Jaffe without Sony's backing...
If you have the money, but don't know jackshit about games, and you don't have a Steve Eisman quality bullshit detector, what are you expecting? Btw there are a lot of excellent indie titles that trump big titles while made by a few individuals, but only a fraction of gamers know about them, because they don't have the money plus marketing machine needed to bring them to a wider audience. Pour your zillions there or hire me, give me a shitton of money, power to kick people in the balls and you'll get your 10x return, lol.
Plus how is this relevant? All I'm saying that the tech is ready, can be made, there are perfect VG examples that can be used as a VR/MV setting, but what Meta showcased is a letdown.
> You are just as likely to get a hit from an extremely talented and lucky unknown as you are from Richard fucking Garfield. A title that cost its developer $1 to make can become a #1 App Store game at roughly the same a-priori likelihood as a game with a $100m budget.
Given this, where is the YCombinator for games? Why isn't someone funding 100,000 ConcernedApes and ToadyOnes in an attempt to cash in on the next Stardew Valley? Serious question.
* Entire economy is right now controlled by FED and mega funds like Blackrock. What Engineers or public think is at the moment is unimportant, entire shift to Metaverse is directed by these mega funds / mega investors.
* So, people that control the economy desperately want Metaverse to happen.
* The reason is that they believe Metaverse will give much needed bread circuses to citizens and keep them happy during the incoming calamities like climate change.
* Moreover, they can easily forcefully strap low income workers to VR/AR glasses and control them more effectively during the work.
* Though there are couple of major problem with this plan.
* Most of the companies working in this area is just interested in suckering the investments. This is very similar to blockchain startups.
* Public won’t be very interested in AR tech, and forcing AR top down will actually create genuine social issues.
I am not going to disagree with any of this, really appreciate this angle. I'll add that from Stratechery type concepts, Warren Buffet wisdom and the like, companies need a moat and in these platform providers its all about the walled garden. If the metaverse were to be the next big thing for sure, you'd want to be the one to capture it. I wonder if FB consulted with the Big 4 or BCG ilk to have the greenlight to go down this road, I'd find it humorous.
Hell, it's hard to believe/digest. Anyway, it seems forced, that's for sure. The 3D glasses/TV madness had similar traits back then. If this turns out to be true, then I'm wondering what will the company who succeeds creating a compelling Metaverse will get in return. :O
It's sort of pointless if you have to just watch it in a video like I assume we all are. I think it would be better if you were in there in the room with John (using a VR headset). Personally I'm listening to it in the background from another tab.
Yea, I actually found the avatar in the video was worse than just audio. It was just enough motion to distract my eye, while being pretty valueless in terms of communicating anything.
I ended up listening in the background, but opened up a new blank tab to hide the motion.
As someone who’s always looked up to carmack, unless he’s forced to do this against his will, i find it disappointing he would promote this failing meta product.
I recommend watching last year's speech by Carmack. It gives a little perspective as to why this was targeted to be a virtual session.
He is not a fan of how Meta pushes the Metaverse, "Money is flowing and enormous wheels in the company apparatus are turning" and he wants to salvage that financial energy to push technology in some meaningful way. (Pushing down audio latency on the Quest 2 was such a talking point). This shows what Meta's tech is capable of, mask off, no per-rendered CG advert and I think that's a good thing.
Besides that, afaik he is largely detached from that project now and only does once a week consulting, with the main focus being his pursuit of AGI.
Doesn't change of course how embarrassingly bad Meta's money invested vs results achieved are.
His job is basically to make it work. A lot of his points are about the current deficiencies and how he thinks he can make something compelling with more work. Everything from lag to loading times to poor integration between the two virtual environments to features he thinks would make the experience compelling.
He’s working at meta one day a week i believe, i dont see how he can improve things. Also how much room for improvement is there for a mobile phone with a builtin vr goggle? Basically thats what the oculus is. Even carmack said there is only this much you can achieve on such a platform. Now if somehow they’d squeeze in more hardware then that could work. Or a dedicated console and stream content via wifi (wireless pc vr works quite well on oculus, albeit the headset isnt that great).
He's not just drinking the kool-aid, he's an exec in the kool-aid company hoping to build kool-aid factories and put a pipeline to a spigot next to the water faucet in every home
Readit News
reading this post on "Avatars, Anthropomorphism, and Autism Spectrum Disorder"...
> A 2016 study looked measured the neural responses of children with ASD and neurotypical children when shown unfamiliar human and robot faces. The test showed that the targeted responses were present for both for neurotypical children, but only for the robot faces for the kids with ASD. “Together, these studies provide some evidence that individuals with ASD may typically process anthropomorphic rather than human faces
https://codebaby.com/avatars-anthropomorphism-and-autism-spe...
The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...
VRChat avatars have personality. On hardware now 6 years old.
People are reacting to the lack of personality, not the lack of immersion.
I think it is weird for a different reason: it looks like 1990s tech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds
When you reach 100m users, the ideas get limited. C'est la vie.
does it?
Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars. There would be no interaction! You'd spend all your time rendering.
It's coming, to, of all things, Second Life. Second Life is adding "puppeteering", and this works with head tracking, face tracking, and full body tracking. Users have been working on VR viewers. (The client is open source.) It's all very experimental, but there is a meeting in Second Life every two weeks[1] where all of this is demoed. Some of the attendees are rigged for full body tracking, and, with good quality Second Life avatars, which have far more detail than Meta or VRChat, and can do facial expressions, they look reasonably good. It's striking how someone with a full rig dominates a meeting without even trying. They're so much more present than the people sitting at keyboards.
Hardware is a big problem. You need a good gamer PC to run all this and get the full effect. And a VR headset. And tracking gear. This is a real problem in the era of the $99 Chromebook. It's not getting cheaper, either. The first NVidia graphics card that was good enough for this was the NVidia 1060 with 6GB VRAM, in 2016, introduced at $250. It still costs about $250 to get that level of GPU power from NVidia.
People who really want to be looked at - performers, influencers, etc - will need a full tracking rig. The audience doesn't.
[1] https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/6509-introducin...
You mean like... video?
Their whole metaverse bet seems weirder and weirder by the day.
I'd rather see video or even a still picture of Carmack than this monstrosity.
This is trying to be vaguely human in hand and lip movement and it looks like bad marionette.
Hopefully it gets better but right now I’d rather just listen to the audio.
Deleted Comment
This is bloody awful quality in visual quality and marketing. You want to show something that works well. This... this does not "work", let alone well.
From the evidence, Meta doesn’t have any.
Then it's will turn into the one true cringe generator.
“Please help me celebrate my Metaversary…”
“Nobody truly appreciates how hard us weebles work to get our Zuckabadges. Next time you see a weeble, give it a ‘/clap’!”
Oh sweet lord this will be horrific.
I’m hoping this is just an expensive example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy because otherwise it’s perplexing and eerie.
The overall bland soulless corporateness of it all is creeping me the fuck out. These presenters are all 100% dead inside.
Facebook missed the boat on owning an OS or phone, so their only hope in protecting access to their apps is by owning a brand-new platform.
Which means that the company is all-in on VR, regardless of whether or not the result will be any good.
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https://makeavideo.studio
Anything the VR stuff is doing feels like a "good on paper" awful distraction.
Now, that said, Meta's seems to be floundering a lot for its actual art style, there is no doubt about that!
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Favorite quote was "one of my internal posts was reported and taken down for not being sensitive enough."
is this parody? The quality of this is really really bad, almost ps2 level bad
Using this for presentation is really unwise.
Deleted Comment
Where are the lines around the corner? where are the reports of sold out VR headsets? I haven't been able to buy a GPU for years, but I'm willing to bet I'll find a discounted quest if I go looking.
You could just log into, I don't know, ARMA III server as a department and host your meeting there instead of this torture.
You know how Nintendo sold a bazillion Wiis and Switches even though their hardware is pretty subpar? They had solid, fun games with charisma and charm.
The VR world, meanwhile, has... uh... disembodied techbros floating in a shrink's office with you? I really respect Carmack, but... what the hell, man?!? Any of his old indie or id software games were SOOOO much better than this Meta crap.
The whole thing feels like a sunken cost fallacy where some True Believers keep making new headsets, but they're not fundamentally getting better... still stuck in dorky-gimmick land.
The bet isn't that the Quest or any extant VR headset _is_ the iPhone, the bet is that some successor of the Oculus could be the iPhone. Facebook is hoping they can either capitalize on it directly or hold the patents to skim the cream off of whomever does.
The current headsets are more like PalmOS -- pretty cool, but not yet cool enough. They're for geeks and enthusiasts. If my silly analogy holds, we're currently waiting for Nokia and Blackberry to show up and miss (but make a lot of progress along the way), and then we'll get an iPhone around ~2028, and the bet might pay off.
If this was a small labs net spending a few million a year… then I’d buy this, but we’re looking at a bet the farm situation.
I think this gap could easily have a hand in preventing the Facebook metaverse from reaching mainstream appeal. We've had gorgeous graphics in games and virtual worlds for quite a long time now - just look at what Crysis achieved fifteen years ago. To the average consumer who doesn't care about the technical limitations and issues behind the product, this is like rewinding the clock twenty years.
As far as why Zuckerberg is so hyped on it - your guess is as good as mine. Just seems like a really misguided attempt at creating a new platform/ecosystem that they control entirely and can monetize.
John Carmack is spent.
Richard Garfield also created Artifact.
Niantic also created Wizards Unite.
Markus Persson made some videos of some kind of Stargate Universe spaceship game with a programmable 16 bit computer. It sounded cool, but people hated it before it was even released.
There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops!
> are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating
It's just super really fucking risky. It's not this, VC thing where you are just putting out winners over and over again.
There are no Marc Lore types in gaming. There's no exit strategy for Marc Lores of gaming. And if you don't have any idea what I'm saying or talking about at this point, if you're like, who the fuck is Marc Lore, you are not comprehending how far you are from understanding the challenge of making these games with huge audiences that last for years.
You are just as likely to get a hit from an extremely talented and lucky unknown as you are from Richard fucking Garfield. A title that cost its developer $1 to make can become a #1 App Store game at roughly the same a-priori likelihood as a game with a $100m budget.
The mistake wasn't taking a risk. Better Zucc make video games than a payment system or a crypto trading platform or a spare room rental company. The mistake is that John Carmack is a dick.
My recollection was that a bunch of people were really excited, a bunch of people were like, "What is this?", and then Notch basically just lost interest and wandered off. I think he's one of those people that needs externally imposed structure and doesn't know what to do with himself now that he's super rich.
---" There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops! ---"
Examples of these big flops please.
Creating a big title is a team effort. You can shove your top designer if he doesn't have a proper team. Ex blizzard guys, almost all of them failed, why? Because they jumped out, believed they were hotshots, but their team/general game idea was lacking. Also look what happened to David Jaffe without Sony's backing...
If you have the money, but don't know jackshit about games, and you don't have a Steve Eisman quality bullshit detector, what are you expecting? Btw there are a lot of excellent indie titles that trump big titles while made by a few individuals, but only a fraction of gamers know about them, because they don't have the money plus marketing machine needed to bring them to a wider audience. Pour your zillions there or hire me, give me a shitton of money, power to kick people in the balls and you'll get your 10x return, lol.
Plus how is this relevant? All I'm saying that the tech is ready, can be made, there are perfect VG examples that can be used as a VR/MV setting, but what Meta showcased is a letdown.
Given this, where is the YCombinator for games? Why isn't someone funding 100,000 ConcernedApes and ToadyOnes in an attempt to cash in on the next Stardew Valley? Serious question.
* Entire economy is right now controlled by FED and mega funds like Blackrock. What Engineers or public think is at the moment is unimportant, entire shift to Metaverse is directed by these mega funds / mega investors.
* So, people that control the economy desperately want Metaverse to happen.
* The reason is that they believe Metaverse will give much needed bread circuses to citizens and keep them happy during the incoming calamities like climate change.
* Moreover, they can easily forcefully strap low income workers to VR/AR glasses and control them more effectively during the work.
* Though there are couple of major problem with this plan.
* Most of the companies working in this area is just interested in suckering the investments. This is very similar to blockchain startups.
* Public won’t be very interested in AR tech, and forcing AR top down will actually create genuine social issues.
I ended up listening in the background, but opened up a new blank tab to hide the motion.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UBmmpt5iJ8
He is not a fan of how Meta pushes the Metaverse, "Money is flowing and enormous wheels in the company apparatus are turning" and he wants to salvage that financial energy to push technology in some meaningful way. (Pushing down audio latency on the Quest 2 was such a talking point). This shows what Meta's tech is capable of, mask off, no per-rendered CG advert and I think that's a good thing.
Besides that, afaik he is largely detached from that project now and only does once a week consulting, with the main focus being his pursuit of AGI.
Doesn't change of course how embarrassingly bad Meta's money invested vs results achieved are.
edit: Fount the spot I referenced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo at 15:10 onward